I
A lovely night had come to pass,
Some twenty years ago,
A lovely night without a past.
She'd given me a purple rose;
I'd let it fall under a stampede.
I’d let them stamp out its seed
And crush it beyond reparation,
Alone in my empty railway station,
Keeping clean from devastation
On a forgotten, defeated nation.
That night I lied to she who didn’t,
And tied myself to this precedent
Of an ultimate ruin in the end,
Where I drive off the cliff at the crooked bend.
That night I’d cried to myself alone
In my bed before I slept, and gone
Through many painful phantasms
With cages carrying imprisoned orgasms.
That night dragged on like a plow
Edged with razors on my skin
Until my blood had ceased to flow,
Far outdone by its sin.
II
Empty footsteps in buried alleys,
Orange sunsets spent alone,
Putrid rivers in barren valleys
Reminded this young man of home,
Once he woke from his night of sorrow
To a tempestuous dawn aglow
On the east end of the purple sky,
Where the sun did burn the darkness dry.
He dressed himself in canvas clothing
And shaved and combed his hair with oil,
Useless attempts to hide the loathing
He had for life, that in his eyes did boil.
He walked out of his wooden cave,
Cold with night’s chilly breath,
For never did he firewood save
To burn on days of nearing death.
He walked across the burning moorlands
That bore the signs of that stampede
Where, in some long lost grain of sand,
He’d lost the purple rose’s seed.
He walked on through across the grass,
And came across an aged home to pass
The old man in his porch sweeping the brown dust,
As his lonely young wife lay burning in her lust.
He walked into her room and stroked
Her hands, looked out at the trees
Swaying in the arid morning breeze,
And lit her on fire with embers stoked
With newfound passion and fleeting
Fancies, that satisfied, will run away
In an instant, leaving old dismay
To Walk back through the door in somber greeting.
III
What if you hide your love away and forget where you've hidden it?
What if you've tried too hard to be the Back-door Man and are left locked outside?
What if you saved up to your last penny and discovered they’d given it?
What if you see a mother in agony searching for her son and you figure he's long dead since the time you poisoned him with your words?
What if you dream that she makes love just like a woman, and you're still a little boy? What if you’ve told her not to cry coz you still love her, being the little boy, unawares that it’s your maimed love that makes her cry?
What if you disfigure your being and risk everything on a coin toss, but the postman forgets your address?
What if you follow her casket praying to lord, just to find her alive and yourself dead?
As the slaves of despair make you their playground,
And forget that they were here to play,
The sun bids goodbye to the trees around
The grazed field in which you lay
Pondering on whether you were betrayed
Or just another scared failure,
And you starting wishing that she’d stayed
On a bit longer, till you were sure.
Suddenly, just a bit ahead of the woods’ end,
You see her calling, hands in air,
You run towards her healing scent
And long to brush against her hair
When earthly sorrow stops you still
And slowly drags home its kill.
